Understanding
by amurderofprose
Summary: The difference that time makes. A revisionist, alternate universe look at what became of Samara Morgan.


**Title:** Understanding.  
**Subject:** _The Ring_ (2002).  
**Characters:** Samara Morgan, Richard Morgan.  
**Fanfic100 Prompt:** 082 – If.  
**Author's Note:** Written for the fanfic100 challenge on LiveJournal. Extremely revisionist and experimental first person POV. Told during the year in which _The Ring_ occurs. If you enjoy this story, check my homepage link on my profile for more like it.  
**Summary:** The difference that time makes.

-o-

I did not kill my mother. In retrospect, I did not even intend to harm her, at least not physically. The truth is, I knew somehow what she was going to do, and just stepped out of the way.

The mental harm—the emotional harm—is another matter, entirely. I expect we'll get to that soon enough. But I do know that even if I _hadn't_ had that spark of foresight, and had tumbled head over heels and perished there in that well instead of her, the events which led up to her demise were set in motion by me, singly, and I might as well _have_ killed her.

Sometimes, when he is very lonely or very drunk, my father thinks that over and over. _You might as well have killed her. You might as well have killed her. You might as well have killed her._

I am not a baby anymore, nor a small child. I was thirty-two years old in February. I do not hold grudges anymore. My father loved my mother, and that is why he hated me—_still_, in some ways, hates me. I understand that now. I accept it. I do not like it now anymore than I liked it then, but I understand, and understanding is something that I did not once possess.

I have never told anyone what happened to me at the well, through words or pictures or anything else. After I knew she was dead down there, some part of me died at that moment too—either that, or a part that was never alive sprang awake with pain. I awoke in a hospital to the sound of my father crying. He looked at me through his hands with bitter eyes, but there was some strange softness in them, too. He lay his head next to me on the bed and wept. He said he was sorry. He said my mother was dead. He said it was just the two of us left and he was sorry again.

One of my first very clear memories is deciding that I did not want to hurt him anymore. I realized that night that he was afraid to be alone. He did not even have his favorites anymore because I had taken them from him too, those big graceful beings with their big eyes and long manes and their flies and chuffing all night. My father would rather spend life with a murderer than have to live by himself knowing what he knew, and remembering what had been done.

So I accepted this and we went home to bury my mother.

When I was ten years old I read _The Girl With The Silver Eyes_. I was the same age as Katie—the misunderstood protagonist with telekinetic powers—and that book held some great and secret profundity for me. My father stumbled upon me reading it in my room—I had moved back into my room in the house after I ended the trouble with the horses—and was amazed that I could actually read at all. I think he was ashamed that, since my mother's death, he had ignored me. He had not taken me back to the doctors but had never paid me much mind either. He was never good at committing to anything except my mother and to horse breeding, and I knew that he was still in mourning. So I ignored him too. I was alone and I came to like it that way.

The last time I _did_ kill someone I was twenty years old. I spent most of my teenage years in and out of Eola again. I had begun menstruating when I was nine and the days I spent on my period were unpleasant for everyone. The things I saw and the things I could make others see were worse during my cycle. I would sit drenched in sweat and blood and burn things. It was the time I was angriest. My father would bring me tea that tasted like mint and tell me that it had always helped my mother, and that my mother had loved me so much. I would look down at my legs later and think, _These legs are red like my mother's legs always were, and my mother is dead, and my mother deserves to be dead._

I was rebellious like any child going through her adolescence, in my own way.

My father visited me at the hospital in the beginning. I think he was trying to make up for the times he had left me there alone and tried to forget about me, and the time after my mother's death that he ignored me still. The same eventually happened again after a few years. His visits tapered off until I hadn't seen him in months by my twentieth birthday, though the cards and letters came with regularity. I think it hurt him to be in my presence. I think he was still afraid that he would start to see the things again, and seeing them firsthand myself, I could not blame him once I understood this.

I don't remember much about what actually happened when I decided to kill the guard, only that what he tried to do did not go as far as it could have. All I know is that exactly one week afterward, he died in the men's room down the hall and was found sitting in one of the stalls by a nurse I did not particularly like. I had only looked at him and that was enough to make him stop. Apparently, it was enough to make him stop altogether. It reminded me of what happened to Dr. Scott, and I felt some remorse, because Dr. Scott had never tried to do that to me.

The day after they found the guard, I wrote my father a letter. Two days later, he had brought me home. I had never seen him so angry, so fiercely protective. I think he saw then that I was safer with him than I was with professionals. He had never tried to hurt me.

It was quiet afterward, much as it was right after the death of my mother. Quiet, but becoming comfortable. The understanding we held seemed to deepen in the days after I returned home for good.

A friend of my father's died that year after I came home. I had never been to a funeral before but my father was so distraught that I was loath to let him go alone. I dressed in one of my mother's black riding gowns—I had never really worn a grown up dress before, even though I would be twenty-one that next year—and I remember during the graveside service that people were not staring at me anymore, even though my presence was unexpected and no doubt feared by some. Instead, they stared at one of the daughters of the man who had died, who was little and sallow with long dark hair and red angry wet eyes.

_She looked like me_, I thought to myself, _when I was that age_. I felt pity for her as I had never felt it before. It was a turning point in my life.

When we got home, I told my father I loved him for the first time. I asked him not to send me away anymore. I did not want to end up like that little girl.

I remembered that he put his arms around me, and I was not repulsed as I had been when I was small. It was like hugging my mother, warm and protective. My father had never tried to kill me, I thought. Even if he never loved me as much as Mommy, he had never tried to kill me.

I went back to the graveyard that night and left flowers for my mother and that little girl's father.

I live across from that graveyard now. My home is a little ways down the road from my father's house. It is a two-story cottage once used as a guest residence for people visiting the Ranch for extended stays. My bed and bath are upstairs, and the downstairs is where I keep my studio and my store room, and where I cook when I am not working. I had walls knocked down and the rooms aired out when I moved in to free up space, deciding this would be my ticket to independence. I would open a shop and sell things.

My father was skeptical. Even in the quiet years I spent with him after my release from Eola I had not cultivated much in the way of social skills or life experience. I had never been to school and I had never lived by myself. I was diagnosed with Down Syndrome in my early teenage years, owing to the fact that my father was a carrier for the gene, and after that I was never really encouraged to better myself in any sort of way, even though nowadays people with Down can live quite normal lives.

It was mostly because those doctors knew the Down diagnosis was a lie. I think they decided this just so they would have an easy way of explaining to visiting physicians what was wrong with me. Instead of saying, "She is socially retarded with irregular sleep patterns and a proclivity to kill what she does not like or understand," they could just hand them a chart with "Down" printed on it, and save themselves the trouble of explaining. I had apple cheeks that have never gone away and big round dark eyes, so that was enough explanation for most people passing through.

Later in life I realized that sometimes this can be a convenient cover, when full explanation is not necessary or desired.

After convincing my father of my sincerity and responsibility, I ended up selling art. It was not an unexpected choice, given the talents I displayed as a child. I decided I would burn things because it seemed to come easiest to me, and the warm rich colors created on a singed piece of wood reminded me of the maple tree at Shelter Mountain, which we have since sold, which is where I last saw my mother.

The accepted term for this is pyrography—the art of burning images into wood, leather, paper. I have practiced extensively with the usual tools to support the lie that I do it by hand. Sometimes in the summer, when I have many customers in the store at once, I will show them how I work, taking the soldering iron and turning a small slat of wood into a seascape or a portrait. It never comes out as good as it would if I were working alone.

The little girl—who is now a big girl—works in my shop on Sunday afternoons tidying the displays and gardening outside and making change for customers. She works in the library other days, and the doctor's office and town hall on others. Her mother owns a cleaning service and so the girl scrubs and sweeps for a living. She tells me, in her own quiet way, that the day she spends at my shop is a welcome change.

Since I moved out, my father's house has fallen into a state of disrepair. He does not breed horses anymore, even though what was in me that caused them to die has been gone twenty years since. I don't think it is the same for him without my mother there. They created something wonderful together, and then I came along.

When business is slow, I will send the girl to his house to run errands and tidy up after him. Sometimes after work on Sundays she will go to his house and cook him dinner. He wants her to stay—he likes her company. Once upon a time, I know I would have sent her to drown as I did the horses. _He loves them all more than me_, I think. But I have learned a very important lesson since then.

One day when I came back from the grocery store I found the girl in my studio drawing a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer she counts as her favorite. I have noticed that it is very popular for young people these days to immerse themselves in things of despair. What it really is is usually selfishness rather than honest suffering—the things they want that they do not get, rather than the things they need but are denied. I have known both selfishness and despair intimately in my lifetime and know the difference. I, like that girl, know the heartbreak of losing one's favorite parent, the isolation of being shunned by the one left, and the anger afterward of the dead parent's betrayal—their having left in the first place.

And then there is the selfishness that follows, the blind hatred, the need to cause pain.

Occasionally in the night, when there is nothing on the television and I can't sleep—I still have never been able to sleep restfully, even after years of Valium and Seconal—I will go down to my studio, pour a glass of cognac, and burn myself a well. While I am doing so I will see what it was that my mother last saw before she died. A burst of white, circular in shape, and then, as my eyes close and the water overtakes me, it appears to implode, leaving only a ring of light behind my eyelids.

I never sell them. I take the wells down to the lighthouse and throw them into the sea. Afterward I linger on the cliffs, remembering the way my mother had flown down into the well, her back straight, her arms outstretched, her hair flying behind her. She didn't even yell. She was so serene. I think she wanted me to kill her.

Sometimes, when I am very lonely or very drunk, I think that over and over. _She wanted me to kill her. She wanted me to kill her. She wanted me to kill her._

But I know that was no excuse to really do it. No more than it was for the horses, just because my father was afraid of me.

In the off-season, when the days grow shorter and grayer, and the wind blows cold salt air through the cracks in the windows of my old closed shop, I often become very lonely. I will go see my father and we will look at old pictures or talk about my work. Then, after the girl calls him in for dinner and I decline the warm invitation to stay, I will come home by myself to my cold empty house. I will pour a drink and sit at my piano downstairs and play a familiar tune for hours on end, over and over, until the three-four time makes me dizzy.

I don't want to ever have children. I don't want to ever place that much hope in something that may never come to fruition. And I don't want anyone to ever sing that song again.

Sometimes the phone rings. When I go to pick it up, a voice speaks. It tells me I was all it ever wanted. I do not yet know if it is happy or hateful. All I can hope is that it understands.

"I love you too, Mommy," I always tell it, and hang up the receiver, receiving no more.


End file.
